Hi, the notebook I use for work has a MASSIVELY irritating problem with the display. Our IT administrators have proven incapable of identifying the problem, so I'm now posting the question here.

The attached picture shows an example of what the display does. It is most prevalent when I use Excel, but it happens on most other software as well. This afternoon I attached a second monitor to work across a spreadsheet and presentation, and the same thing happened on the second monitor. In fact the problem was worse on the second monitor... The only way to correct the display is to drag the mouse over the areas you want to see. Or alternatively to minimise and restore the window itself...

At this stage my best guess are that the graphics card is either failing, or I have too little memory, or the processor is too slow.

About two weeks ago, a HP technical consultant from the UK advised me that this is a problem caused by MS Office (i.e. this is a software issue). He advised me to uninstall Office completely (including Outlook) and re-install.

I did this, and since I was due for the upgrade anyway, Office 2010 was installed in place of 2007, after uninstalling 2007 completely.

And guess what, the problem is back with a vengeance. I am now reasonably convinced that this is a hardware failure of some description, particularly after other replies to this post, which are not limited to any specific manufacturer, other than the common denominator of having Intel onboard graphics...

I've asked our IT department to replace the laptop or the motherboard entirely, whichever comes first.

replacing the entire computer with a a new one of the same make and model and rebuilding the harddrive

upgrading the graphics driver

downgrading the graphics driver

We are seeing two manifestations of this issue. The one is as described in this original post, the other is that entire horizontal sections of a window remain behind when another application is maximized. Sometimes refreshing the screen works, sometimes not. In some cases the machine performance degrades to the point that it has to be hard booted, in other cases if you leave the machine alone for 10 minutes or so, it will recover. CPU and Page File Usage looks fine during these episodes.

The issue occurs in and out of the dock though I've only personally seen it while in the dock. I can't say if in all cases only a single external monitor is attached or if it occurs with dual monitors.

It looks like a screen refresh problem but we just have not been able to duplicate the issue in a test environment. I can't say for certain it is hardware or software since, on the one hand no matter what we've attempted software-wise it hasn't resolved it, and replacing hardware hasn't resolved it either.

We do not see this on all machines of this make and model, just a small population.

We now have a person on point in our organization who will be working with Dell and Intel to hopefully find a resolution.

I have a similar situation what I have figured is that uninstalling the Intel driver and leaving the Windows generic VGA driver works better. Anyway's in my situation works fine as the computer is only used for limited software use, no real graphics needed works fine.